Now, eleven years after her son's accident, Tricia no longer wondered how exactly one dies when a car explodes. The question had once consumed her: was it an impact of some kind, a head against a steering wheel, that did the job? Was it fire? Or maybe shrapnel as the drunk-driven Toyota flew off the road and careened into the pole of a parking lot security light and violently disintegrated? Now instead of how, Tricia thought about where. Skyland Boulevard. The parking lot of the Wal-Mart. Christopher had died here, in front of a store she had never liked going to. In front of a place she'd always associated with traffic jams and discount toilet cleanser and fat ugly people screaming at their fat ugly children. Tricia visited this place once a year even though doing so only ever made her want to flee back to her second husband and the life they'd made almost a whole continent away from here, their four-bedroom "cabin" and the cool of the mountains. But in the end she supposed that this place where Christopher had died was what America was now or maybe what it had always been: the sizzling, shimmering blacktop of chain store parking lot after chain store parking lot, each section connected to each other but never in a way that was clear or easy to navigate.